The Warden, page 5
She looked up at Rus, the knife in her hand unstained by blood or gore. His eyes were wide as he stared at it.
“What is the secret of that blade?” He looked sheepish asking.
“No secret. I told you. It’s an Anatomist’s blade. It’s a focus for my Necromantic casting … and it has certain properties.”
“Can it cut anything like that?”
“Only dead flesh,” Aelis answered. Though I’m damn well not supposed to be using it on venison, she thought. With Rus’s help, she flipped the carcass over, and began slicing away the hide. It came away easily.
“Why would you need a magic weapon that only cuts dead flesh?”
“Well,” Aelis started to answer, before biting off the words as she cut. “Sometimes you need to cut up a body. Find out what killed it, and how, and for the very best Anatomists, even when.” And all of that was true, if only a part of the truth.
“Seen enough bodies in my day. Never felt the need to cut on them any more than they already were.”
Aelis’s hands were quickly reddened to the wrist, but the butchering was done, the animal reduced to pieces she or Rus could move. A few minutes in Martin ventured outside carrying a large wooden platter. He took one look at what they were doing and gasped, dropped the platter, and ran back inside.
“He’s not got much of a stomach for butchery these days,” Rus said, though he stuck his head into the doorway and yelled for Martin to bring them a bucket of hot water, soap, cloths, and a brush. Then he piled up as much as would fit on the platter and stood, shouldering the door open.
It took him several trips, but in the end the work was done, some bones were in a stockpot, some were handed off to the village dogs, some of the meat was hanging in the cold room, and Martin was busy deciding what to do with the rest of it. She watched him for a moment as she took the bucket back inside. Now that the bloodiest work was done he didn’t seem to mind dealing with the pieces. She watched as he reached for a large-bladed knife. Then his hand paused in midair, fingers trembling. She was about to approach him when Rus came to her with a tray and gestured back outside with his chin.
There was an old, weather-beaten wooden table behind the back of the inn and he directed her to it. The tray held bread, butter, a jug of small beer, two plates and two cups.
They sat, ate for a while in silence.
“So, is Tun local? A village lad who decided he just liked the life of a woods bachelor?”
“Don’t know,” Rus said. “I doubt it. He started coming into town about a year after Martin and I took over here. Refugee, maybe, or a veteran, scarred by what he had done, what he had seen. Some of the folk who come back from a war don’t want to spend too much time among other people. I don’t ask. Don’t expect he’d answer if I did.”
“And some come back with their wages saved and buy a crossroads inn in a remote village, hmm?” Aelis raised an eyebrow over the edge of her cup.
“Missed the bit about not asking and not answering, eh?” Rus smiled to take the sting out of his reproach. “Some of it was wages, yes. We didn’t come straight here after our term. Spent some time back home. It…” He paused. “Didn’t work.”
Some pieces fell into place in Aelis’s mind. A warden was constantly developing the information they got, after all, making facts fit with other facts. Martin’s war-haunted, she thought. All available evidence pointed to it; his skittishness, problems with blood, his shaking hand as he reached for the knife.
“What did you and Martin do in the war?”
“The same thing most everyone else did, Warden,” Rus said.
Aelis sensed that she’d overstepped, for Rus lapsed back into silence and quickly finished his breakfast.
“We’ll do better by you at supper,” he said, and stood.
“Before you go,” Aelis said quickly, brushing past the instinct that told her to apologize, reasoning it might make her look weak, “is there other work around the village I might be able to help with today?” She had something in mind, but it didn’t seem quite the time or place to suggest it.
“Someone, somewhere, is always trying to repair a fence,” Rus said. “Walk around and look for the gaps.”
“What can I do to help repair a fence?”
“Extra hands are always welcome,” Rus said as he disappeared into the back door of the inn.
Aelis sighed, and went looking for work.
* * *
She found it about a quarter-mile walk from the crossroads and the inn, where outside a farmhouse a boy was working overtime to keep sheep penned up while his father and mother worked at repairing a fence, just like Rus had said she’d find. The fence was made of rough branches lashed together, barely seasoned and smoothed, not the finely planed planks she’d expected. The woman was holding one end of a long branch against the sturdier posts, while the man held it with one hand and tried to lash it in place with the other. She swallowed her hesitation and tried to seem naturally interested as she walked close.
“Could you use some help?”
The boy’s attention turned to her and he lost track of the sheep he was trying to turn back into what remained of their enclosure. His mouth fell open as he stared at her sword. The woman, startled, nearly dropped her end of the post. The crude sign she made, bending her middle fingers and thumb into the palm of her hand, didn’t help her resettle it.
Aelis tried not to let her disappointment show.
“It’s nothin’ to concern yourself with, Warden,” the man said, fighting the urge, she thought, to knuckle his forehead as he did. “We’re doin’ just fine on our own.” He turned to glance over his shoulder at the son, who was still gawping at Aelis.
The sheep, a small herd of only a dozen or so, were starting to edge away toward the boy, nosing at the sparse grass, which got thicker and greener near the large gap the farm folk were trying to repair.
“Abel,” the man barked, “mind your work!” His tone jolted the boy out of staring at Aelis but also startled the sheep.
She didn’t think, she just did; Aelis grasped the hilt of her sword with her left hand and raised her right, her fingers bending and moving in ways that made her knuckles ache and would’ve blurred the vision of anyone looking too closely.
The ward she drew was simple, low to the ground, but larger than usual. Extending in a semicircle from one part of the complete fence to another, it wasn’t built to absorb energy or any force stronger than a running sheep. Which it promptly did, as more than one of the startled animals ran headlong into it. Aelis felt the impacts in her hand and in her head as gentle throbs, though they weren’t painful.
Yet.
“They’ll not pass this barrier so long as I hold it,” she said slowly, carefully. “Though any of you could step over it just by lifting your leg a little higher than your lower cross-posts there.” She gestured to the complete parts of the fence to either side of the gap. “It’ll be no trouble to keep this up while you get a workable fence in place, goodman…”
“Bruce,” the man said, “and this is my wife, Ada.” He gaped at the sheep milling in front of what appeared to him to be empty space. When Aelis looked, she could see the shimmering band of her ward, little more than a foot off the ground. Had she expended the power, she could’ve made it visible to the others, but there was simply no reason to do that.
“I’m Aelis, Bruce,” she said. “And I can do this for some time, but … perhaps it’s best if we get on with fixing the fence, hmm?”
Bruce and Ada nodded quickly, and Bruce waved a hand for Abel to join them. The boy scurried over and helped to keep the branches stable while his parents tied them off.
It hadn’t been a hard ward when she cast it, but five minutes in, as the family got a second branch in place, then a third, she was sweating. In ten minutes, she was as grateful to drop that ward as she would’ve been to set down that calcination oven in her tower, assuming she could’ve lifted it in the first place. Hoping that she hadn’t visibly sweated through her shirt, she gratefully unwrapped one hand from the hilt of her sword and let the other fall limp to her side before it could cramp up.
“Stregon’s Knuckles, Warden, do you think you could just cast those sorta spells around our pens all the time? I’d no idea your sort had such useful magics,” Bruce said, coming to the edge of the newly fixed fence. He appeared to have forgotten his earlier reluctance.
“Not that would stand for much longer than I just did, goodman,” Aelis answered. “As for my sort…” She smiled, though she knew it was weak, and she saw the smiles on the family starting to disappear. Quickly, she hitched at her belt, patting the leaf-bladed sword in its leather scabbard. “This marks me as an Abjurer. What I did was the basis of our work; we call it a ward.”
“But that dagger means you’re a Necromancer, don’t it?” Abel had crept up behind his father till his nose was pressed just over the second branch of the fence. “All raisin’ the dead and suchlike.”
Bruce and Ada both turned glares that promised punishment on the boy, but he was too rapt, staring at Aelis, to pay them much attention.
“It does mark me as having studied Necromancy, Abel, that is true,” Aelis answered. She wasn’t bound never to lie, exactly, but had often heard that it was bad policy, so she decided to give the boy as honest an answer as she could without frightening him. “But what you say is not what the College of Necromancy of the Lyceum does. We do not raise the dead, as you say—we study how to destroy that kind of creature in all its guises, and those who would create them.” She saw the boy’s eyes widen and she allowed herself a smile. “If you know what the dagger means, Abel, then what of the sword?”
The boy frowned. “Abjurer?” He was slow and careful around the syllables of the word but got there in the end.
“Which means I protect people, with wards and other spells.”
“And your sword?” Abel was suddenly very excited, his eyes wide and focused on the hilt.
“Only if I have to.”
Abel seemed about to say more before his father’s hand descended upon the back of his neck. “Well, there’ll be no call for that around Lone Pine,” Bruce insisted.
“Of course not, goodman. Of course not. But in the unlikely event that there is … I’ll be here,” Aelis said with a faint smile. Then, with a slight nod toward both Bruce and Ada and a wave at Abel, she set off back around the village.
In the hours she spent walking about the green and the nearby farms, she saw no one else who appeared to need her help at any task she could conceivably help them tackle. She offered greetings and made small talk about the weather—which the locals seemed to take far more interest in than Aelis ever had—and the coming change of seasons.
She ignored the superstitious and inefficacious signs she saw half a dozen people make behind their backs as she passed.
“What more do you need to know about it than how to dress for it? Why would anyone think I could read clouds? What in Seven Hells does that even mean?” She’d kept those thoughts to herself as long as she was in the village proper, but once she left it she couldn’t help but marvel, and to take the first deep breath she’d allowed herself since the sun had started bringing out the headier notes of wool and shit.
As she neared her tower, Aelis turned her mind to the puzzle of the calcination oven and how she might get it into a usable position, what she might be able to do with it. Something else nagged at the back of her mind, some task she’d meant to do, but she couldn’t quite recall what it was.
Then she saw that the door to her tower was hanging open, with its lower hinges twisted away. She ripped her sword from its sheath, shook her wand down into her left hand, and began to advance cautiously up the low-rising stone walkway.
She paused and listened at the door. The only sound she could hear was the incredibly faint metallic whirring of the orrery’s minute movements. Lessons from her swordmistress flashed in her mind. Stance wide, weight shifting, sword held loosely enough to move but tightly enough that it couldn’t be snatched away. Breathe deeply through the nose, exhale lightly through the mouth. Lavanalla, at six feet tall and with three feet of curved sword in her hand, had always made it look easy and sound ridiculous.
Balance and pain, Aelis thought. Always balance and pain. She had a knack for the cryptic. Never met an elf who didn’t. It wasn’t always cryptic, though, as she remembered the elven abjurer hurling small, sharp stones with uncanny accuracy and bruising force while her students stood on a plank balanced on a short log. Deflecting the missiles with a ward was the right answer; trying to do it with a blade led to more rocks and more bruises.
Aelis dismissed the reminiscence from her mind and quashed her hesitation. Sword and wand in hand, she barged through the door, relying on power on the basis that stealth would give her no advantage. She’d already gathered and sharpened her will, pushing it toward wand and sword both, ready to call up a ward or unleash some manner of charm.
There was a blur of motion in front of her. She called up a Second Order ward, the two syllables and her concentration on drawing and then expending the power through her sword. The air changed around her and the hair on her neck stood up as her power solidified in the air.
With no idea what to expect, she’d called her ward to protect against physical and magical force; it radiated out from her like a shield clutched in the hand that held her sword, and she crouched low to make herself small behind it.
And when the goat that had been loitering inside the tower bounced off of it and then let out an aggrieved scream, she very nearly aimed a cut of her sword at its neck instead.
Aelis expelled her ward and felt it pop like a soap bubble, sending a tingle over her skin and spine. Then she sheathed her sword and busied herself chasing the goat out of her bottom floor.
With the goat yelling and clattering its way down the stone walkway, Aelis’s first instinct was to check her orrery, which seemed untouched. She watched it for long enough to see the subtle movement of the tiny crystal moons around the slightly larger blue earth, then placed a hand over it and found the trace of her own power humming within.
Then, with a mounting terror, she thought of her books and dashed to the other room, separated by the curtains she’d hung to divide the bottom floor of the tower in half.
With relief that drained most, if not all, of her lust for the blood of that goat, she saw nothing out of order. Aldayim was sitting atop her writing desk. The books were arranged in their alcove.
She went to sit down, picking the Aldayim and the desk up, when something drew her eye back to the books.
They were not in the order she’d placed them.
Falling to one knee in front of the shelf, Aelis walked her fingers along the spines. She kept her books arranged by subject and then alphabetically by author. Necromancy was mixing with Abjuration at the very head of the shelf.
“Oh gods,” she muttered. “Where’s Dwergoch?” Quickly, she sorted through the books on both the shelves in the alcove, then looked around the base, then rifled through the books again. With rising panic, she searched the entire floor, top to bottom, lifting and moving anything—a cloak, a jacket, her robes, every book, her lap desk—that could conceivably have hidden the book. She looked under the chairs, under the wardrobe, under the tables in the front room where she’d set her alchemy equipment. She spent at least an hour scouring the entire bottom floor of the tower before she finally admitted defeat.
It was gone. Her copy of Dwergoch’s definitive Wards and Combat Abjurations for Sword or Axe. Creamy, heavy-weight paper, silk-stitched into oak boards covered with leather dyed a blue that matched the College of Abjuration’s official color. The margins were filled with her meticulous notes on sword forms and the way various hilt and blade styles functioned as foci for her Abjurations. Her time with that book had ultimately led to the design of the sword she carried on her hip, with its leaf-shaped blade and twisting quillons.
The notes were in a cipher, and there was little a layman could do with the book. But its loss cut her in ways she didn’t want to think too deeply about.
Dalius snapped into her mind, and she recalled his pretensions of being her equal.
“If he has broken into my tower and stolen that book, I will kill him,” she said aloud, though she knew even as she said it that her judgment, should it become official, would stop short of death.
She considered her options. “I can’t simply go down into the village making accusations,” she said as she sat down and took up her writing desk. From within, she took out paper and a charcoal stick and began to write out a list.
Ask Rus about Dalius.
Find out who in Lone Pine is lettered.
Keep an eye out if merchants come to town.
Prepare draft statement warning merchants if anyone tries to sell books to them.
Get the fucking door fixed.
Make goat stew.
She read over the list she’d written out, thinking which items she could act on immediately. She lingered over the first point. Did she trust Rus and Martin enough to go involving them in something potentially serious?
“Have to trust somebody,” she muttered, writing casually, not openly in tiny print beneath her first item. Two, three, and four would be longer-term goals.
Five was something she could and would begin to deal with right that very moment.
She stood up, gathered her formal robes from the wardrobe—thankfully it didn’t seem to have been disturbed by her intruder—and as she left, considered what to do about the door.
Aelis placed her hand against the warped wood and drew her wand. What she had in mind was complex, perhaps devious, but not dangerous. She took a few steadying breaths, but in truth, anger had always sharpened her Charms.
With the fingers of her right hand tracing a sign upon the door, a ward that would require dispelling before anyone entered, she pressed the tip of her wand into the center of it with her left, spoke two syllables, and stepped back, nodding with satisfaction.
Anyone opening the door until she’d carefully taken down the ward would be in for a surprising few hours.
